Know Your Copyrights

In the age of samples, remixes, guest verses, and a general sense of anyone’s music being fair game to tweak and change, understanding what constitutes copyright infringement can be pretty tricky. Even artists acting in good faith can make mistakes; many who are coming from a sincere place of wanting to share a great cover or remix, or incorporate a sample into an original work, later find out they’re in violation of the law.

As you can see in this Game Plan video, getting your music up on Spotify is pretty easy. But it’s up to artists to understand the basics of copyright and metadata — to know when they have the right to distribute their music, and how to properly credit their songs. Violating copyright laws can result in having your music pulled from Spotify, not to mention being slapped with a lawsuit.

To help you sort through it all, we recently spoke with Thomas Karlsson, who leads the copyright infringement team at Spotify and was nice enough to give us some pointers.

How to Do Copyrights Right

Covering: Covering a song means you’re performing someone else’s composition, and the good news here is that you don’t need permission from the songwriter or original performer to cover their track. What you do need to do, though, is to credit the songwriter as the composer when you upload the track to Spotify, so that he or she can be paid fairly. And make sure you assign credit correctly: Don’t cite the songwriter as a guest artist or inaccurately label it a remix. Even if you change the tempo of the track or sing it in a different style than the original, if you’re performing someone else’s tune, it’s a cover.

Sampling: Sampling means you’re using actual snippets of another song in your recording. The length of the snippet doesn’t matter — as long as the sample is recognizable, it needs to be cleared. To clear a sample, you need to get permission from both the publisher of the song and the label that owns the recording. How much you pay to secure that permission can vary wildly, so it’s good to do some research before you get too attached to the sick beat you just made from that O’Jays record.

While purchasing the rights to a sample by a famous artist can be very expensive, bypassing that step and later getting sued for copyright infringement can cost a whole lot more. Sampling an indie artist’s track can be easier, or at least cheaper, but even if you’re borrowing from a friend’s track, you need to get permission and credit the sample when uploading your song to Spotify.

Remixing: This process is similar to sample clearance: To distribute a remix, you need to get permission from both the label that owns the recording and the party that owns the composition. Oftentimes, labels work directly with remixers and/or make permission relatively easy (and inexpensive) to secure, but make sure the metadata accompanying the song gives the original songwriters credit. As with clearing samples, it’s a good idea to make sure you can secure the proper permission for a remix before you lock yourself in the studio.

How to Do Copyrights Wrong

Karlsson says that while most of the artists who commit copyright infringement do it unknowingly, there is a subset who do it willfully in order to try to boost their own career at the expense of someone else. Spotify is building a number of protections in order to more quickly catch those outliers. Here are some definite No-No’s.

__Misappropriation: __As much as you might wish Rihanna could be a guest on your track, don’t put her name on there to try to gin up listens if she’s not actually on the track.

Drafting on another artist’s play counts: “I have seen cases where a band will rip audio from a well-known artist and upload it under their own name,” says Karlsson. The play count for the original song will remain intact and can be used by unscrupulous artists to try to get playlist placements and press coverage. If you stumble on an artist page where one track has millions of listens and others have hundreds, that’s a pretty clear red flag. On the flipside, don’t try to upload your own music under Justin Bieber’s name. Karlsson says that you’ll get caught and likely won’t even get credit for any of the plays.

Playing the name game: If the name on your birth certificate happens to be Taylor Swift, then you’re extraordinarily lucky—but even then, you might want to consider recording and uploading tracks under a different name so your music can stand on its own. And if you really don’t share a name with a famous artist, don’t go tweaking yours just for Spotify. Ditto for messing around with common misspellings of pop-star names or adding SEO keywords behind the name of your band. Just upload your own tracks under your own name, and you should be fine.

If you think someone has infringed on your copyright, Karlsson says there are avenues to pursue a resolution. “Go to spotify.com/legal and fill out the infringement claim form, and we will look into it from there,” he says.

—Cortney Harding